Friday, January 11, 2008

Columbia professors going to apologize to Ahmadinejad?

[Edited and links added November 12th]

According to the Tehran Times a group of Columbia professors is going to Tehran to apologize to Ahmadinejad for President Lee Bollinger's comments to him when the Iranian president visited that campus in fall 2007.

[Note: This report has not been officially confirmed and, if it does go, it will not be an official Columbia delegation.]

Maybe, while they are there, they might ask about the young boys who were hung for homosexual activities [maybe that's why Ahmadinejad said there are no homosexuals in Iran they have all been hung...].

They might ask about those professors who have been punished and imprisoned by the government for speaking their mind.

They might also ask about the woman who was stoned for killing her husband. The woman, age 23, was married at age 15 to a man who apparently abused her.

They might ask about the Amnesty International report that, by mid-October 2007, 250 people have been executed in Iran so far this year – 21 of them on the morning of September 5th alone. This includes children. Iran has been described by human rights organizations as the last executioner of children.

They might ask about the 30 people hung during July and August as part of a suppression of efforts to spread democracy. [One of the reasons we know about the hangings is that they were done publicly. Even Texas doesn't do that.]

They might ask why Dr. Esfandiari, who was held in solitary confinement for 105 days, was arrested in the first place.

My guess is that they won't ask any of these things because they will be too busy groveling and they are more worried about Ahmadinejad's freedom of speech than that of the people who have been persecuted by this regime.

3 comments:

Gandhi's grandfather was the guy who suggested the Jews of Germany commit collective suicide as a response to Hitler's genocidal aggression. Years later this same Gandhi repented not of this absurd suasion, telling one of his biographers (LouisFischer) that "the Jews died anyway, didn't they." He also wrote an open letter to the people of England at the beginning of the war against Hitler and his Nazis, advising them, "Let themtake possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. Youwill give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds." (A legless insinuation not unlike Fairplay's denigrative suggestion that all soldiers whose bravery merited them the VC were docile automatons.)Gandhi also, not long afterward, wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler (I've never read this letter).

So hearing that Gandhi's grandson is making these discrepant statements about the Jews of Israel is no surprise to me. I've always thought Gandhi a complete idiot, and it sounds as if the grandson is no different. "The apple never falls far from the tree."

As for that madman in Iran and the madmen from Columbia courting his friendship, hey, what do you expect from fools so enamoured by academic etiquette that they cannot bring themselves to inculpate the religion of Islam as the cause of these atrocities in Iran. It simply astounds me that so few people--especially the "experts"--see these brutalities taking place in all places where Islam has become the predominant religion, and yet nothing from them but an assenting silence. Wake up, world.

"After Kashmir, it is going to be Junagadh and Hyderbad. Then it will be the entire world of unbelievers." -Ajai Sahni

IsraelNN.com) Arun Gandhi, grandson of noted pacifist Mahatma Gandhi, has resigned his post at an educational institute he founded after making anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments. Gandhi on Saturday apologized for the remarks, saying “Unintentionally, my words have resulted in pain, anger, confusion and embarrassment. I deeply regret these consequences.”

In an op-ed piece last month, Gandhi said that Israel was "a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs," Gandhi asked whether it would "not be better to befriend those who hate you? Apparently, in the modern world so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept," he wrote. "You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."

Arun's famous grandfather also had very negative views on Israel. "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home," Mahatma Gandhi wrote.